Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First ...

However, Heidegger’s distance from Hegel is ultimately not that great. Being or Sein simply replaces Geist as the monolithic principle that threatens to distract us from the particularity of human existence.

Levinas’s critique on this point takes two main forms. He sometimes argues that Heidegger’s concept of truth as Being’s “revelation” (aletheia) commits him to a similar thesis about the coequality of reality and rationality that one finds in Hegel and Parmenides. Heidegger may denounce much of Western philosophy as blind to the significance of prereflective life experiences, but he ultimately upholds a similar view insofar as he characterizes reality, or Being, as something that reveals or “discloses” itself in human consciousness. Thus Heidegger is susceptible to criticisms like those which Kierkegaard and Rosenzweig leveled against Hegel.¹⁸ Elsewhere, Levinas focuses on Heidegger’s phenomenological analyses of various aspects of everyday human existence and tries to show that, despite their richness, they depict it as nothing more than the successive manifestation of a single substance: Being.

Again, the details of these critiques need not concern us now. The key point to note is the more general worry about philosophic inquiry that Levinas develops in criticizing Heidegger. Levinas came to think that the errors that tainted Heidegger’s thought pervaded much of the history of philosophy: most philosophers’ theories committed them to the same reductive monism found in Hegel and Heidegger. He borrows a pair of terms from Plato’s Sophist to discuss this monism. Plato argues in the Sophist that the categories of “the same” (to auton) and “other” (to heteron) are basic categories that cannot be derived from each other or any other categories, such as being or nonbeing.¹⁹ Levinas invokes this distinction in his work, claiming that most philosophies privilege the category of “the Same” (la Même) over that of “the Other” (l’Autre). What he means by these terms is difficult to explain. It helps to note that he uses the French word autre, which corresponds to our use of other to refer to something distinct from things mentioned or implied. One would use autre, for example, to say I prefer the other film. (Je prefere l’autre film.)